About Me — Hannah Johns

Chinese Adoptee, Preacher’s Kid, Survivor, Social Worker, New Yorker

image owned by author

I am a product of China’s One Child Policy. Two years after the Waco Siege, I was adopted by a Southern Baptist Preacher’s Family in Waco, Texas. My childhood was characterized by the enmeshment of church, community, family, and society at large. There was nowhere I could go where no one knew who I was. For my larger-than-life, small-town, famous pastor father and the fact that I was one of the only Asians in the community, my mixed-racial family stuck out like a sore thumb.

I remember the first time I saw a racial mirror in an adult. A student from Baylor University was testing me at my church-run private school, and I felt special because I had been chosen to be pulled out of class that day. I was given Japanese rice crackers as a treat for finishing the tests. I remember hiding and hoarding them away in my room because they were the first Asian thing I had ever owned outside of the trinkets my mother had brought back with us from my adoption.

Growing up, I recall spending several hours in the bathroom gazing into my reflection in the vanity mirror, feeling disengaged and disconnected from my body. Like I didn’t quite look like what I was supposed to look like. I would later learn that the lack of genetic, cultural, and racial mirrors in…